Avoiding Misuse of Google Event Markups

Within the world of online marketing, there are some publishers and webmasters who use misleading tactics. One such tactic is using event markups in a way that’s misleading to searchers – but Google is cracking down on this.

Google is warning publishers and webmasters alike not to use event markups in misleading ways. As punishment for those who do, Google will remove the ability for your entire site to show rich snippets in search results – a big negative for many companies. Let’s look at these new guidelines, and how to be sure you’re staying within them.

Clarified Guidelines

Google received a lot of feedback on the misuse of an event markup, so they clarified some guidelines. Specifically, they’re calling out publishers in the coupons and vouchers space – these publishers are marking up offers with an event markup. An offer is not an event, and Google doesn’t like this. Here’s what they wrote:

“Using Event markup to describe something that is not an event creates a bad user experience, by triggering a rich result for something that will happen at a particular time, despite no actual event being present.”

Google’s Action

If you’re a publisher who does this, Google has said it may take manual action – this is when a human who works for Google marks your website as doing something that’s against their guidelines. This will normally result in a rankings demotion, and may also result in a structured data markup for the entire site not being used in search results.

Notifications

If your site gets flagged for one of these manual actions, you will find the notification for this in your Search Console account. You can use this information to take corrective action, after which you can submit a reconsideration request back to Google.

For more on the correct use of event markups, or to find out about any of our internet marketing or SEO services, speak to the experts at SEO Werkz today.